Women in labour are increasingly being subjected to unnecessary and unwelcome interventions such as caesarean sections, warns WHO

Medical staff and midwives should not intervene to speed up a woman’s labour unless there are real risks of complications, says the World Health Organisation (WHO), warning that too many are not having the experience of natural childbirth that they want.

New guidance from the WHO overturns decades of previous advice, which said that labour which progressed at a slower rate than 1cm of cervical dilation per hour in the first stage was risky. Women are often given the drug oxytocin to speed up labour and end up with epidurals because of the pain, followed by forceps or vacuum deliveries and in some cases a caesarean section.